Oh I See (CIO Inverted)

CIO inverted is OIC or "Oh I See" !

A CIO Blog with a twist; majority of my peer CIOs talk about the challenges they face with vendors, internal customers, Business folks and when things get through the airwaves, the typical response is "Oh I See". Some of you may disagree with my meanderings and that's okay. It's largely experiential and sometimes a lot of questions

Updated every Monday. Views are personal

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Recently came across an interesting article on “Why IT
projects still fail ?” and the subject caught attention as it is still being
discussed. It had references to some spectacular failures where the blame was
squarely placed on the implementation partner; another one where business users
at the bottom of the pyramid showed spirited resistance to the new way of
working. Finally it quoted the most popular reference on IT projects with
limited change in results over score of years with IT Business Alignment
retaining high marks.

Reasons attributed to the dismal success record included inadequate
resources, overly aggressive timelines, underestimated costs, overlooked
requirements, unanticipated complications, poor governance and human mistakes
such as bad code can all lead to project failure. Surprisingly a quote “the definition
of success is evolving with traditional measures of scope, time, and cost no
longer sufficient in today’s competitive environment. The ability of projects
to deliver what they set out to do — the expected benefits — is just as
important.”

Everything pointed the finger at IT; they are understaffed,
overpromise, don’t know how to estimate costs or gather requirements and stick
to them and finally are bad project managers. Also I am not sure about the
world the respondents of this 2017 global report live in if they do not
articulate the benefits in business terms. Okay, I take my words back, I do
know of a few who still are unable to, but those are exceptions. Interestingly
the article goes on to define formula for success without addressing the core.

So I dug a bit on the background of the author and found no
evidence of having either run an IT shop or been at the receiving end. The
article was an observation based on statistical evidence from various reports
and the hypothesis that has lived for long: IT does not communicate, IT does
not know the business, IT needs to sell the project to business, IT should
prepare a business case and illustrate the benefits, IT should get the budgets
sanctioned and then monitor time, cost, resources, success, failure, … really ?

Let’s for a moment shift focus from IT to the business
folks; business models have undergone major upheavals and digital has been thrust
upon the willing and unwilling alike. Majority of the incumbent leaders and
giants have been slow to react – unwilling to accept reality brushing it off as
irrelevant – and then finding someone (read IT) to blame for not delivering in
(the constrained) time while the new players have eaten market share. They have
treated the change like a technology project rather than technology enabled
business transformation.

Success stories are all about the handful of enterprises who
decided to create cross-functional teams to evaluate and respond to the
upcoming opportunity. They did not hire consultants to give them a roadmap, or
define waves of implementation, or hire from outside to lead the internal team;
they were willing to change, explore, experiment, willing to take risks, and
understood the limitations of pure technology over the collaborative success
that they had co-created multiple times in the past along with IT.

The leaders do not hand off accountability, they find ways
to induct others into their vision; they are always on the lookout for creating
differentiation against competition. There are no IT projects, only business
projects that use technology. Even mundane decisions like cloud evaluation or
change in support vendors seek business impact and changed outcomes. IT
responsibilities and KRAs are spelled out in business terms; this is the real
world of pervasive IT today which has shed the technology skin of the past.

In such a world then why does “Why IT projects still fail ?”
still find a headline and mention ? Such reports and publications continue to
berate technology teams. They find it convenient to continue using the old
scapegoat without looking elsewhere if the paradigm has shifted. So are these about
the laggards and disconnected teams who have failed to stay current and
relevant in the new normal with shrinking business and loss of customers ? This
does not appear to be the universal truth but sensation sells better than
reality.

Can business grow up and take responsibility for success or
lack of it rather than live in a world of transferred responsibility especially
when things don’t work out the way they were planned ? Can the technology teams
stop being subservient and stand up to their professional achievement and pride
? Wherever the chasm still exists, can both start by acknowledging it and work
towards building a sustainable bridge that will offer achievement of business
objectives ? A necessary step to stay relevant internally and externally.

Thursday, August 03, 2017

The term unicorn has been bandied around a lot more in
recent times than fairy tales of past; in some circles, unicorn spotting is a
very profitable sport especially early on. The number of unicorns had grown
rapidly a few years back but appears to be slowing down. Most of the earlier
unicorns have scaled higher after they achieved the status ($1 billion
valuation or market capitalization), the younger ones are happy to be acquired.
Meeting young and not so young founders some interesting trends are emerging.

The startup ecosystem has been conducive for many budding
entrepreneurs with path breaking as well me too ideas tweaked to local markets
or different segment of the market; many of them reached a critical mass to
sustain a set of customers and grow organically. The founders were focused on
building real business offering products or services to their defined
customers. They build sustainable costs and drove business with passion; as a
result they also created new proposition and market where none existed.

Their growth was not exponential and neither was their
market valuation; demonstrating patience they learnt from their mistakes,
changed course when customers demanded a change, collected a team of passionate
believers and sought money only when they wanted it for a specific purpose.
Their perseverance paid off with founders, investors, employees and customers
benefiting from the glory that was due to them. These unicorns get discussed in
every conference on disrupting the market and innovation.

For every outlier that made it, there are thousands if not
more who fell of the wayside, cast into oblivion, never to be heard of again;
not that their ideas were not good or the founders not passionate enough, they
somehow failed to execute and change course when required. In a few exceptional
cases, the founders bounced back wiser from their learning of falling, nobody
is tracking the rest. But that is not of significant interest except to
historians, the focus at this time is on the ethics of startups seeking
valuation to sell.

Recently in news one of the potential unicorns was accused
of fudging data and questionable business practices and ethics. The
whistleblowers were ex-employees whose conscience woke up when it did, probably
when they discovered these or maybe because they did not get part of the
spoils. Irrespective of the instigation for them to come out, the more
interesting fact is the shock it created for the industry and the business;
auditors descended with vengeance to scrutinize data, transactions and reports.

They had scaled well and zoomed past some of the earlier
players with initial rigor that gave them a financial cushion courtesy of
investors and venture capital. Their success was talked about with release of
growing numbers that showed path to profitability and the fact that the scale
made them larger than competitors. They were portrayed to become the first
unicorn in their defined segment; within a year with increasing valuations they
managed to hit the magic number and were formally classified as a unicorn.

Greed is a very big motivator; the founders and investors
believed that they were onto something big and that it will surpass all
expectations. Founding team tweaked numbers to show continuous exponential growth
even when the market was not growing; investors believed the story. All the due
diligence and rush to invest in the company was built on the first big round of
funding and the credibility of the investor; future investors did look at the
numbers and aberrations were explained by the founders to their satisfaction.

The reality hit the investors when allegations surfaced on
everything not being as it appears to be fulfilling the idiom: if something is too
good to be true, it probably isn’t. Auditors painstakingly poured over the
records separating the truth and fiction; incriminating evidence pinned down
some of the senior staff who worked at the behest of the founders. With operations
curtailed and staff motivation down, the valuation went Deep South and
customers came out with their own version of horror stories.

In hindsight it is evident that though the company was built
on a real business opportunity, the love affair with valuations resulted in a
change of strategy to build for valuation so that the business can be palmed
off at the height of the hype. Greed again played a role in the exposure when
some of the perpetrators discovered that they were not going to benefit to the
extent they believed. And all fell down as the nursery rhyme goes, the
investors turned their attention to check their other invested companies for
similar ailments.